CBC is running an exclusive interview with Cougar helicopters employees about the search and rescue mission its dedicated SAR helicopter flew the day one of its S-92s crashed.
There’s a paragraph in the middle of the CBC online story that leaps out for attention, given the focus in media coverage on the whole issue of 103 Squadron being on exercise at the time of the incident:
Cougar normally supplies backup to the Canadian Forces for search and rescue operations run out of its base in Gander, in central Newfoundland. But on March 12, the base's Cormorant helicopters were involved in a training exercise in Cape Breton, so Cougar's own rescue team was pressed into service.
“Pressed into service”.
That makes it sound like something was jury-rigged and unprepared, like Cougar didn’t normally do this sort of thing.
As the saying goes, nothing could be further from the truth. Cougar provides dedicated search and rescue service to the offshore oil industry. It isn’t an accident. They didn’t throw something together in haste that day.
Well, they shouldn’t have thrown it together because they apparently already knew where 103 Squadron was when CHI91 launched that Thursday morning and therefore knew the flying times involved.
Nothing in the CBC online story explains why it took the Cougar SAR flight so long to launch.
There is plenty of good stuff for Cougar and its people. It’s a nice piece, the kind any public relations person would be happy to see in this sort of story given the inevitable questions that are already being asked about every aspect of this incident including Cougar’s own SAR response.
But given that the attack on 103 Squadron is largely a media-driven angle, one has to wonder: is the spin in this piece coming from CBC or Cougar or both?
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